Going Wayback to the very first version of our website

I sat at my beige tower PC with the 17” square monitor and got to it. Hours and hours I spent, poring over every word and pixel.

Writing the HTML in… I’m going to say Microsoft Front Page?

Endless messing with CSS, which I didn’t really understand and whose rules have never sunk in.

A pirated copy of Photoshop to make the logo, with vectors and everything.

It launched in 2007 with little fanfare, apart from an email to friends and family. Still, it felt like a crowning achievement and the start of something.

Soon after, the Wayback Machine took its first snapshot:

Impressive, right?

No, I don’t think so either 😬

It doesn’t help that the CSS and images are missing from the snapshot.

But the important thing is that it worked.

I was able to launch a business with a simple static website and no paid promotion.

(The below snapshot is from a later version of the site, snapped in 2011:)

Would that still be possible in 2026?

Maybe, but the landscape was definitely a lot different back then.

The web was less cluttered, sites were less sophisticated, and there were far fewer digital marketing agencies around.

That meant two things:

• I quickly hit the top of Google for “copywriter glasgow” (the city where we started out!)
• That simple website gave me a viable presence, and it got clients clicking the contact button

And so Wheatleys got off to a good start almost 20 years ago. I’m proud to look back at it, despite its dated design and missing graphics.

Today, we actually pay for the software we use - but I still make the Wheatleys website.

And although our current site is more polished than the 2008 version, it still says essentially the same thing…

If you need help with a writing project, please get in touch!